Posted
by
timothy
on Thursday June 06, 2013 @09:43AM
from the didja-save-those-receipts? dept.

jfruh writes "Did you buy an Acer laptop with Vista and less than 1 GB of RAM? The company has a thumb drive it would like to send you. Did you get an unwanted text from Papa John's? The company would like to make it up with you with $50 worth of free pizza. These and other little rewards are available as a result of class action lawsuits that have wound their ways through the court systems and now, years later, are paying off for very large groups of tech users." I wonder how many USB drives the lawyers took as their share.

It sounds more like these settlements are paying off for the defendants. Papa John's pulled off an especially neat trick there, getting the court to accept pizza the customers don't want in lieu of statutory damages.

Them and the lawyers who brought the case to the court. In most of these class action lawsuits, the lawyers "fighting for the little guy" end up getting huge amounts of money. Sure they have to pay their own bills, but it often goes a lot further than that. There shouldn't be any options to give out free stuff in these class action suits. The payouts should be cash only. $50 worth of pizza doesn't cost Poppa John's $50.

The point of a class action lawsuit isn't, unfortunately, to compensate the members of the class. The point of a class action lawsuit is that there are too many people who suffered minor damages to really be able to logistically handle that.

The primary point of a class action lawsuit isn't to "fight for the little guy," it is to punish companies that do wrong. If lawyers end up making $2 billion off a lawsuit, well, that's $2 billion out of the company's coffers. And before you go spouting off about how ultimately they pass that cost on to customers, maybe they do, but if so, that puts them at a disadvantage compared to other companies. Or put another way, if Domino's is giving their customers good quality pizza while Papa John's is skimping because they are trying to pass a $2 billion lawsuit judgment on to their customers, they'll lose market share. But I digress...

Anyway, I don't necessarily agree that the lawyers should make so much off of a class action lawsuit, although they really should make a lot, since they're handling the details of compensation which costs a lot more than most people think. What I'd like to see is some kind of public fund set up for money like this to go into, such as to build parks or something, so that the end effect of punishing the companies is maintained but the incredible amount of time, effort, and money that goes towards mailing a few people checks for a buck or two isn't wasted. At least that way, you also avoid the problem that class action payouts usually aren't that high since most eligible claimants won't bother to jump through the hoops to get their judgment.

The primary point of a class action lawsuit isn't to "fight for the little guy," it is to punish companies that do wrong. If lawyers end up making $2 billion off a lawsuit, well, that's $2 billion out of the company's coffers.

No.

Punitive damages do that. Compensatory damages are intended to make the plaintiffs "whole". The jury or judge will make it clear which damages are intended to do what. Remember, class actions aren't just for pizzas, they're also for injuries and death caused by negligence.

Either way, I think there should be parity in awards to the attorneys and the plaintiffs in a class action suit, both in time and monetary value. If the class is paid in coupons, the attorneys are paid in coupons.

The attorneys are free to sell the coupons for cash.

If the plaintiffs are paid cash over a period of time - say a trust has been established that pays medical bills- the attorneys should be paid incrementally as the trust is used up. The attorneys certainly have the option to sell that revenue stream for an immediate payment - they'll probably get 50-70 cents on the dollar.

The point is that class action attorneys should have their interests tightly aligned with those of the class, otherwise they will cut deals that benefit only themselves. The best and simplest way to do that is to reward them as a percentage of the net present value of the market value (not face value) of the plaintiff's share of the award.

When you join the class, you are agreeing to the lawyers' negotiated settlement.

It's the class's negotiated settlement, not the lawyers'. The suit is started by the lead plaintiffs, who hire the lawyers. It is the lead plaintiffs that agree to any negotiated settlement, not the lawyers. The whole point of the action is to satisfy the interest of the class, not the lawyers. I realize that these principles are often abused, but those are the principles nonetheless. Lawyers who get too careless with them get jail time: just ask Bill Lerach.

Thanks for pointing out why the entire legal system is just plain fucked. YEARS? Why the fuck should it take years for something like this, huh? And why should it take a lot of skill? "Here's what happened, your Honour: company A did X to Y number of customers. Oh, and here's some proof that they did it." The skill would be on the part of the judge to determine if it's a valid case and how to rule it.

Really, the US (and most other countries as well) legal system is a goddamned shambles and an utter disgrace

It takes years becuase the system allows for appeals, and tortfeasors are allowed to continue cases for a variety of reasons, ostensibly to discover more facts related to their case (but really to try to wear down the plantiffs). But think if those rules were changed. People would sue people and win based soley on who went to court first. That's not going to work either.

Now you are in the position of stripping the victims of their rights. If it hadn't been for the lawyers "blowing the whistle" on the corporations the individual would not get anything and the corporation would get away scott free. You are in fact flying in the face of conventional economics, where the negative consequences of the actions of a corporation is costly. If there were no cost involved then moral hazard would rear it's ugly head. Stop slamming the lawyers, they did not cause the problem. It was th

What kind of harm did Papa John's cause by sending a few texts? How many people that got these texts were charged anywhere close to $50 for having received them? This is one example of why the US legal system has issues.

I am from the same town as John Schnatter. I ate papa john's pizza when there was one "store" in the back of a somewhat crappy bar. It was great. Over the years I would usually always try to get PJ's whenever pizza was being ordered out of hometown loyalty (I guess).

Having said that, papa john's is not much better than little caesar's is nowadays. It is terrible, terrible mall pizza.

It sounds more like these settlements are paying off for the defendants. Papa John's pulled off an especially neat trick there, getting the court to accept pizza the customers don't want in lieu of statutory damages.

It's typical for the company's products or services to be offered in a settlement (as opposed to ruling).

That is nothing. When I was in high school I was a member of one of those CD club things where you bought some and got some for free. I think it was BMG. There was a class action lawsuit and I got three discounted CDs in the settlement. The court ruled I was screwed over by BMG and the settlement was the option to pay them more money for the privalege of receiving my share...

These aren't the results of judgments, they're the rewards for settlements. So if you ever wondered why the end result is so awful it's because the actual money goes to the lawyers while the people for which the lawsuit was intended to provide justice get cheap plastic kazoos. This is supposed to be okay, though, because "class action lawsuits are intended to punish companies, not restore damages." The best part is that by accepting your cheap plastic kazoo you're also signing away any other legal recourse you may have had.

it's called small claims court and the chance of winning is far better they you'd think. I'll take $250 dollars - depends on the state - EG California now allows $2500 for spam and such per incident. Now if we'd all simply take advantage of these laws and start collecting from the most egregarious offenders.

I had a run in with small claims years ago just after I graduated from college. The insurance company didn't want to pay anywhere near the fair market value of a vehicle that was totaled as determined by various objective not involved 3rd parties (NADA, KBB, and an independent appraisal). I paid my $35 filing fee which you could as part of your requested damages. The car sat in storage with the insurance company for 6 months as they stone walled me and I went to court. I went in with a stack of paper to prove my point that included:
The KBB value of the car
The NADA value of the car
The independent appraisers valuation of the car
Examples of very similar cars and their asking price with pictures they were all in really bad condition and/or had really high mileages even by my standards with one having 750,000+ miles on it
Examples of the same vehicle in the price range the insurance company was claiming my vehicle was worth
The data and method the insurance company used to come up with a valuation

I presented my stuff and picked apart their valuation making sure to point out where they had deducted things multiple times. The judge then asked the insurance company to justify their valuation in which they presented their method and data that I had presented. The judge looked at the insurance company lawyer and told them they should have just settled as what I was asking was perfectly reasonable. The whole court proceeding took about half an hour. After that the insurance company still stalled on getting me my money and I had to threaten to get a lien against their assets as I had a court order to have my money by a certain date which had passed and I was now legally allowed to do so and if I didn't have my check by the end of the day I would be doing that. About an hour later my check was hand delivered. In the end they ended up paying the fair market value of the car, storage for 6 months, what ever it cost to have someone go to court, what ever it cost to prepare for court, and what ever it cost to have someone hand deliver a check to me when it should have only cost them the fair market value of the vehicle.

More people need to put the screws to companies like this and things would get better quick because what ever it costs you in your time it will cost the company more. If a kid just out of college can force a big insurance company to pony up just about anyone can.

Good story. I don't think I would have thought to take an insurance to small claims court. I always assumed that was more for interactions between individuals or local business, rather than with MegaCorp. Highly educational. Glad it worked out for you, too. I know several people fighting with insurance companies over lousy valuations, I'll be sure to mention this to them.

Small claims court is just that to be used for small claims. There is an upper limit of the claim you can make in it that is fairly small with a typical upper limit range of a few hundred to a few thousand. It is nothing like Judge Judy but is still fairly informal formal. My advice is don't BS the judge with legal jargon, stick to provable or proven facts, keep it short and be polite. Be sure to find out what the upper limit is for the claim to be sure you are filing in the correct court, when I had mine I

Keep in mind this is only effective if the corporation you're suing has some kind of tangible property in your state. If you're suing some out-of-state mail-order company they'll just ignore the summons and the ruling, and you won't be able to collect unless you sue them in their own jurisdiction, which will no doubt cost you a lot more.

But, for big corporations, yeah, small claims works just fine (unless they can get it bumped to common pleas).

The judge looked at the insurance company lawyer and told them they should have just settled as what I was asking was perfectly reasonable...In the end they ended up paying the fair market value of the car, storage for 6 months, what ever it cost to have someone go to court, what ever it cost to prepare for court, and what ever it cost to have someone hand deliver a check to me when it should have only cost them the fair market value of the vehicle.

The judge was correct in his ruling, but wrong in his advice. The insurance company did exactly the right thing (from a selfish perspective). Sure, you stuck it out for months and did a lot of work and went to court, but most people wouldn't bother with that. So, in the end maybe this cost them $20k instead of $5k, but in the other 99% of cases they save $3-4k If they just rolled over when you challenged them they'd end up paying the $5k far more often (though it would save them $15k) - lots of people w

The "people for which the lawsuit was intended to provide justice" were minorly inconvenienced. A cheap plastic kazoo sounds pretty OK when all that happened to you was you got an unwanted text message. The entire premise of a class action lawsuit is that the harm is so negligible at an individual level that nobody would ever sue.

This is supposed to be okay, though, because "class action lawsuits are intended to punish companies, not restore damages"

Yes, yes they are. Saying it in a sarcastic tone doesn't make it less true.

The best part is that by accepting your cheap plastic kazoo you're also signing away any other legal recourse you may have had.

Not quite. The best part (if my notice of the Sony PSN class action settlement is typical) is that by not explicitly excluding yourself from the settlement (i.e. even if you take no action to claim the cheap plastic kazoo), you're giving up any further legal recourse you may have.

Even better, if you don't specifically say you have no desire to be represented for a kazoo (even if you don't know about it until after) you still give up your right to legal recourse, even if you never claim your kazoo.

These aren't the results of judgments, they're the rewards for settlements. So if you ever wondered why the end result is so awful it's because the actual money goes to the lawyers while the people for which the lawsuit was intended to provide justice get cheap plastic kazoos. This is supposed to be okay, though, because "class action lawsuits are intended to punish companies, not restore damages." The best part is that by accepting your cheap plastic kazoo you're also signing away any other legal recourse

They did the work, and they took the risk. They also made it possible for a company to be punished without requiring people to spend a day at a courthouse for a minor damage. If class actions were not available then any company could rip off its customers so long as it kept that theft below the amount that would motivate most folks to go to court.

Class Actions are like unions. They serve a purpose, keeping the corporate bosses honest, but have grown wildly out of control and benefit the people that run them much more than the people they represent.

I agree on the first point and disagree on the second. Like unions they are fast becoming nerfed to the point of uselessness. Class actions and unions benefit all of society and are being castrated by the corporations to ensure they are no longer a hindrance. Your idea that they have grown when they shrank like unions is like the effect of the media you consume. I urge you to turn to actual statistics instead.

Pretty much all one sided contracts, like cell phones now include verbiage forbidding class action

If the penalty is reflected in the price of next year's line of Acer laptops, then more people will buy from Toshiba instead. "Passing it on to the consumers" only works when the entire market is passing it on, not just one company.

"Passing it on to the consumers" only works when the entire market is passing it on, not just one company.

I think tobacco companies might disagree.

They're affected by competition like everything else, though in their case they're granted an enforced oligopoly on the market (your government at work - I do not believe it is legal to start a new tobacco company). Most of the costs that they've had to pass on though were industry-wide ones like the big tobacco lawsuits - so the entire market was passing it on.

Or, in case of Acer, it could enable them to move product that wasn't moving (say the Thumb drive was at a very low density that nobody wanted). In case of Papa Johns, they get to show all those extra pizzas as product that had to be made and delivered to customers, if not technically sales.

Acers free thumb drive will be factored into 1q2014 quarterly profit and expenditures accordingly. it will be reflected in the price of the $next_Acer_laptop

So not only do they get a free thumbdrive, but competitors laptops will be cheaper for the same thing since the cost of those drives has been added to acers new units, which I wasn't planning on purchasing anyway having been burned by them last time?

So... how is that not a win for me?

tl;dr: at no point does your class action windfall guarantee companies

$50 in free pizza at Papa Johns might be used by President John Schnatter as damage control for his recent plan to raise the price of his food based on the healthcare reform act.

FWIW, to give him credit, he was quoted out of context over his supposed "attack" on HCR, which did include positive commentary on, for example, the fact it leveled the playing field and meant he could provide insurance to his employees without that giving his competitors an advantage over his company.

I ran Vista, and Windows 7 very easily on a 2GB machine. It only went above the 1GB line when I was running a VM that soaked up 512MB for itself, despite my best efforts. You do know that much (most?) of the memory usage on a modern system is caching, right? Empty memory is wasted memory.

They pretty much never lead to anything but a payday for lawyers, and an almost insulting token gift (if even that) for the plaintiffs. At least the Apple one sounds good for those who were denied, but how many people still have texts from that long ago to prove Papa John's sent you a text?

The obvious solution is to have everyone in the potential class opt in at the start of the lawsuit. If the lawyers needed actual clients before proceeding, these suits would almost never happen (and probably be settled much more quickly).

Verizon Ordered To Provide All Customer Data To NSAPosted by samzenpus on Thursday June 06, 2013 @12:27AMfrom the do-you-hear-what-I-hear dept.http://yro.slashdot.org/story/13/06/06/0140252/verizon-ordered-to-provide-all-customer-data-to-nsa

But in order to get any of this you'll need to provide us with extensive information which will be used for marketing purposes, and sign away some other rights.

Most importantly, these 'settlements' amount to trivial amounts, and no real admission of guilt... gee, a whole 16GB USB stick for selling a laptop which is patently not suited for the claimed purposes, several years later when you can buy one at a gas station for $10. That makes up for selling a shitty product in the first place.

The Acer settlement (and all the others mentioned here, if I had to guess) is for US residents only. [kccllc.net] It's too bad this couldn't have been mentioned in the summary, the linked article, or even the front page for the settlement.

Are the/. editors yet unaware that the majority of its readership lives outside the US?

Papa John's pizza needs to be hit with another class-action lawsuit. I've witnessed something quite illegal - here in California, delivery drivers have $1 taken off of every credit card-paid delivery they make where the tip received is over $1.95. That's a violation of California Labor Code 351.

Might as well keep suing ol Schnatter until he's out of business permanently.

I always tip cash. That also leaves it in the hands of the tippee as to how they report it to the taxman. Also, tipping on the card can mean it takes a while for the cash to get to the receiver and cash flow can be an issue for people working those jobs.

"That also leaves it in the hands of the tippee as to how they report it to the taxman."

Pretty much every driver here makes less than federal minimum wage, including the tips, before illegal credit tip deductions, mileage, etc. Which means we're not reporting at all, because we're routinely falling under the filing threshold ($9,750 for 2012)

It's not my job to ensure others pay taxes. I am not the IRS. If more people were responsible for actually paying their own taxes rather than it automagically disappearing from our paychecks, perhaps there would be some pressure for restraint from government (and they know it).

The first class action I got involved in was pretty decent. A replacement CD-writer for one that died early. The replacement wasn't SCSI like the original but fair enough. I'd bought the original one used anyway.

The last couple that have come in my mailbox though were just stupid. For trivial things that were nobody's fault and were just a waste of time and resources to take through the courts. They went straight in the trash.

What I would like to see a class action for is the broken GPS on the Galaxy S that

> What I would like to see a class action for is the broken GPS on the Galaxy S that I carried for 3 years

Yes! Hell yes! Why that wasn't a fiasco of biblical proportions I'll never know. I finally ate the penalty to end the contract so daughter could get a phone that actually worked. We haven't bought a Samsung product since.

That and the total inability to get the AT&T techs to understand that approx positioning via cell tower is NOT the same as GPS satellite lock. No, it's not. Not even a litt

I've never owned a Samsung phone but I hope to someday. They look nice.

On the other hand, FUCK ATT. They are fucking bastards and I hated every single moment that I was their customer. I'm on a prepaid plan now (PagePlus) and much happier. My service is cheaper and better and it is totally impossible for me to be overcharged.

Fair enough. Daughter went through six Galaxy phones before I paid off ATT and she switched to a Verizon Bionic. But it did seem like a whole pallet of Galaxies had fallen off a truck on the way to the ATT store and they decided to sell them anyway. Lots of different bizarre issues, of which lack of GPS was only the most common.

Well, I certainly appreciate your anecdote, it will make me do extra research before I ever buy a Samsung. I had never heard of the problems you describe. But their reputation is good and gaining so if I ever buy a new smartphone (I've never owned a new smartphone*, only used ones, and never a Samsung) then they are a likely choice for me.

* I tried that Republic phone for a month but it didn't work well enough. It's a great concept but the implementation, alas, left too much to be desired.

In all fairness, I'm told that the later Galaxys are a lot more reliable. Still, before I left the store I'd download the free gps testing app, go outside, and see how many satellites it finds. If only one or two, you may have trouble.

I received an email a week ago about a settlement on optical drives. Apparently it is about drive manufactures colluding to keep the disc drive prices artificially high. The email was sparse on details of the settlement and did not have details on claim amounts or how to redeem yet.

The question I had was how they determine the amount. The settlement includes PC component drives and consumer electronics devices that have drives built into them. As someone who has built a personal computer and purchased two b